Chuck Taylor, All Star

The True Story of the Man behind the Most Famous Athletic Shoe in History

Abraham Aamidor. Foreword by Dean Smith

Publication Year: 2006

His is the name on the label of the legendary Converse All-Star basketball shoe. Though the shoe has been worn by hundreds of millions, few, if any, know a thing about the man behind the name. Some even believe that there is no such person, that he is a marketer's fabrication like Betty Crocker. But "Chuck Taylor" was more than a rubber-soled, double-wall canvas-body shoe with a circular ankle patch, with a bright blue star in the middle and a signature across it. He may not have been a Michael Jordan, but Chuck Taylor did earn the right to be the face behind the most popular shoe in basketball.

For this first-ever biography, Abraham Aamidor went on a three-year quest to learn the true story of Chuck Taylor. The search took him across the country, tracking down leads, and separating truth from legend -- discovering that the truth, warts and all, was much more interesting than the myth. He found Chuck involved with "industrial league" basketball in the 1920s, working as a wartime coach with the Army Air Force, and organizing clinic after clinic. He was a true "ambassador of basketball" in Europe and South America as well as all over the United States. And he was, to be sure, a consummate marketing genius. He was elected to the Sporting Goods Hall of Fame before his induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. This biography makes it clear that he belongs in both.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

TOC

Foreword

When Abraham Aamidor called from Indiana to interview
me for his new biography of Chuck Taylor, I was amazed that
someone had not written one years before, because Taylor
was such an important figure in America’s basketball history.
Obviously, I’m extremely pleased that Abe is filling this void. ...

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments are written for the people who actually
help with a book, typically with no ulterior motive or expectation
of any reward. Grady Lewis, Joe Dean, and John Wooden
were the closest associates of Chuck Taylor I found, and each
was most generous with his time. Other sources who ...

Introduction

It’s a Wednesday night, March 19, 1919, in Columbus, Indiana,
a prosperous manufacturing and agricultural center of about
9,000 souls forty-five miles southeast of Indianapolis. The recent
hard winter has not quite broken. Inside a two-story, red
brick government building, in the high-ceilinged second-floor ...

1. Hall of Fame

Five aged men stood on the podium in the hotel ballroom in
Springfield, Massachusetts that early spring evening in 1969.
Each was dressed in a business suit, tie, and heavily lacquered
leather shoes—a far cry from their usual togs on a hardwood
court, where each had fought his way to recognition as a great ...

2. Non-Skids

Charlie Taylor, at 6-foot-1 and 190 pounds, was becoming a
man. His great shock of thick, dark hair was combed provocatively
straight back over his head, and his long jaw demanded
attention. He was just nineteen when he stepped forward with
firm posture and resolute gait onto the floor of the Akron ...

3. Salesman

Akron may have been a watershed in Chuck Taylor’s playing
days. Firestone and Goodyear basketball continued to prosper,
but Chuck was not part of it. After leaving the Non-Skids,
he moved to Detroit and joined teams supported by first the
Dodge Brothers, the famous automobile manufacturers, then ...

4. The Invisible Pass

The Great Depression spelled doom for some, opportunity for
others. For Chuck Taylor, it was the time of his life. Marquis
Converse had lost his company in 1928 after it went into
receivership. The company’s failure was linked to an ill-fated
effort to market an automobile tire, the “Converse Cord,” ...

5. Special Service

Word of Alabama’s clash with the Texas A&M Aggies in the
upcoming Cotton Bowl dominated the front sports page of
the Nevada State Journal on Dec. 2, 1941. But it was an item
running down the left side that garnered more attention from
a core group of basketball enthusiasts in Reno that day. The ...

6. Air-Tecs

Chuck Taylor was sitting on a narrow bench in the cavernous,
tile-lined fieldhouse at Wright Field, Ohio in early December
1944, watching his “boys” go through an early evening
workout and jawing with a local newspaper reporter. John
Mahnken, who not long before was the 6-foot-8 starting ...

7. World Tourney

Pete Ankney was dumbstruck when he saw the Chicago
Stadium, that holy shrine to political conventions, college
commencement exercises, and basketball games for generations
of Chicagoans, for the first time. Located just two miles
from downtown on West Madison Street, the stadium was ...

8. “Me”

John Wooden sat in a cramped den in his suburban Los
Angeles condominium where he has lived thirty years, in a
room crowded by an old sofa and recliner, at a desk buried
beneath mounds of correspondence, and just under a wall
plastered with photos of all his UCLA championship ...

9. Glory

Chuck Taylor, then in his sixty-eighth year, received many
telegrams, congratulatory letters, and goodwill calls when he
was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of
Fame in 1969. The letters and cards and telegrams were piled
high on a circular table in the breakfast nook inside his Port ...

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